Hurricane Elena....1985...Category 3

For several hundred years, many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular saint's day on which the hurricane occurred. Ivan R. Tannehill describes in his book "HURRICANES," the major tropical storms of recorded history and mentions many hurricanes named after saints. For example, there was "Hurricane Santa Ana" which struck Puerto Rico with exceptional violence on July 26, 1825, and "San Felipe" (the first) and "San Felipe" (the second) which hit Puerto Rico on September 13 in both 1876 and 1928.

Tannehill also tells of Clement Wragge, an Australian meteorologist, who began giving women's names to tropical storms before the end of the 19th Century.

An early example of the use of a woman's name for a storm was in the novel "STORM" by George R. Stewart, published by Random House in 1941 and since filmed by Walt Disney. During World War II, this practice became widespread in weather map discussions among forecasters, especially Air Force and Navy meteorologists who plotted the movement of storms over the wide expanses of the Pacific Ocean.

In 1953, the United States abandoned as confusing a 3-year old plan to name storms by phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) when a new, international phonetic alphabet was introduced. That year, this Nation's weather services began using female names for storms.

The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men's and women's names were included in the eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico.

Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive names in written, as well as in spoken communications, is quicker and less subject to error than the older more cumbersome lat-long identification methods. These advantages are especially important in exchanging detail storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, airports, coastal bases, and ships at sea.

The use of easily remembered names greatly reduces confusion when two or more tropical cyclones occur at the same time. For example, one hurricane can be moving slowly westward in the Gulf of Mexico, while at exactly the same time another hurricane can be moving rapidly northward along the Atlantic coast. In the past, confusion and false rumors have arisen when storm advisories broadcast from one radio station were mistaken for warnings concerning an entirely different storm located hundreds of miles away.